As the rain and the snowcome down from heaven,and do not return to itwithout watering the earthand making it bud and flourish,so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth:It will not return to me empty,but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

It wasn’t until sometime after I graduated from college that I opened a Bible for the first time and read from it. Thanks to my twelve years of education in Christian schools and attendance at church every Sunday I was familiar with many of the stories in the Bible. I knew Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead, but I never read for myself the stories in the gospels about the crucifixion and resurrection. I always was taking someone else’s word for what is written in Scripture and for many years I was fine with that. I was happy to let the “experts” to fill me in.

Christine, my roommate in my second year of college, read from her Bible every day. I can still picture her sitting on her bunk bed reading from Scripture. I admired her discipline and I was intrigued by the delight she took in reading from it, but I still wasn’t motivated to pick it up and read it for myself. Perhaps I thought it would be too hard to read…or more likely, too boring.

After college, I moved to New York City with a friend, who, like me, was an aspiring actress. Siri never failed to read her Bible every morning and before going to bed at night. She talked with me about her faith, answering my tentative questions, and invited me to her church. After about six months (and several more invitations to church) I went with her to Grace Church on lower Broadway. There, for the first time, I heard the good news that changed my life:For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God… (Ephesians 2:8).

Right then and there I wanted to know more about this good news of grace, how I’ve been saved through no striving or deserving of my own, so I started to read the Bible – and I couldn’t put it down. I began with the letters of Paul and I underlined everything that spoke to my heart. I still have that Bible, although the binding is shot and the pages are falling out. From time to time I’ll take it off my bookshelf and trace with my finger the ink underlining the passages that leapt out at me, some thirty years ago. I remember the joy I felt in discovering God’s word in Scripture; how I sensed he was speaking right to me in every verse I read.

my well-used first Bible

Back then I also bought several pocket Bibles so that I could read from Scripture while on a subway train or waiting on-line or for a bus. I still have those, too. One is in my car, and I read from it while waiting in the carpool line to pick up my son after school; others are in various purses and beach bags. To this day I don’t want a Bible to be far from my reach.

Several years after my first encounter with the gospel of grace I went to seminary, an undertaking I had not anticipated, yet felt called by God to do. It’s probably not a surprise that my favorite courses were about the Bible. In due time I graduated and was ordained and charged with preaching the word I had come to cherish and study intensively. But sadly, not long after taking up my calling of preaching and teaching, I stopped reading the Bible.

Don’t get me wrong – I read over the passages on which I was to preach – and I studied carefully the chapters about which I had chosen to teach, but I stopped regularly reading the Bible with the joy and wonder and eagerness with which I had begun, while still a struggling actress in New York City. The Bible became something I read and studied for work, not for sustenance.

A number of years later, worn down from the demands of parish ministry, I picked up my Bible again and began to read – to read with a hunger that surprised me. I started at Genesis and read all the way through Revelation in a matter of months. I had never read it cover to cover before. And when I finished, I began all over again.

I have not stopped to this day. My daily reading has taken on a comfortable pattern: at breakfast I read a chapter from the Old Testament, a chapter from the New Testament, and a psalm – and I do the same after lunch. At bedtime I read a brief passage or psalm. When I finish each testament, and the book of Psalms, I start again at the beginning. I wouldn’t think of going a day without reading from the Bible. I know only too well what can happen to me if I forsake the word of God, described to us in the letter to the Hebrews as “living and active” (4:12). The memory of what it feels like to be dry and empty is something I hope I never forget, lest I take Scripture for granted again.

Scripture is food and drink for the spiritually hungry and thirsty. This kind of hunger and thirst is something only God can satisfy and one of the ways he does so is through his word in Scripture. By ceasing to read from the Bible daily, for my personal edification, I had cut myself off from a vital source of sustenance and from the rhythms of God’s voice. I couldn’t help but lose direction in my life because I was starving, spiritually, and I had lost the ability to understand the language God speaks.

Daily engagement with the Bible — in a variety of ways, including reading and study — trains our ears to recognize what God is saying and doing in our life. Scripture provides us with a frame of reference for how God acts, and helps us to understand God’s perspective, which is so foreign to our own. Our need to learn and relearn God’s ways is lifelong because God acts contrary to the ways of the world in which we live. Scripture tells us about a God who will stop at nothing – even death on a cross – to win back even the ungrateful and uninterested. The stream of voices we hear daily – our own and those in the media – will never help us understand such love.

The Bible knows us better than we know ourselves and when we cease to read the story of our salvation, from beginning to end – and all over again – we forget who we are and to whom we belong. This kind of amnesia will wither the soul.

Next week: What it means for us that Scripture is ‘living and active.’

7 Responses to Scripture (first in a series)

Claudia, What a superb posting about the importance of daily scripture reading. I find myself that if I am not in a formal pattern of Bible reading daily, I am not growing in my relationship with Christ. Although my pattern is not so in depth as yours (I use Scripture Union’s Encounter with God), I still find many things on which to meditate. THe Bible is not only the story of how God is going to reestablish His kingdom, but a critical way to hear His voice in His leading you on the right path for one’s life. I look forward to all you have to say in this upcoming series on your blogsite. SusanMontgomery

Thanks, Claudia! I love how God speaks to us in His word – if we’ll just stop, be quiet, and listen. I reread the Nicodemus story on Monday and was struck again by it. I’d read the “you must be born again,” hundereds of times. We all come to that with our own histories, and we’ve got pretty set ideas of what it means, how we categorize it. I just kind of breeze over it. I kind of run the “bornagain” words together… and then I read “born” and “again” separately and thought how that must have sounded to him. I realized, Jesus does the totally, wildly impossible. He starts our lives all over again. How many times had I read that bit of scripture and missed it. You can read scripture every day and it’s always still new. Thanks for sending us back to the Bible. We really do meet God there.

Joy, I just love what you wrote: “You can read scripture every day and it’s always still new.” My hope is that all of us would come to the Bible with that expectation — that we will encounter God’s vibrant and timeless word to us. Thank you so much for writing. Claudia

Thanks Claudia for sharing with us your own relationship with God and His Word. I find it to be just as you have said that if I do not consistently read the Bible my thoughts and my perspective turn negative or cynical for starters. Reading His Word daily helps me stay connected to the Lord relationally and helps me see myself, others and the world around me with His perspective instead of my own. For me personally I find taking smaller passages and pondering them in my devotional time helps me connect with the Lord relationally instead of informationally. Jennifer

Jennifer, thanks so much for your comment and for sharing with us how God’s word brings healing and wholeness into your life. In my next post (tomorrow) I’ll be addressing the restorative power of Scripture. Thanks again! Claudia

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Quotable Corner

"Non-discipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees every thing in the light of God's overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10). The cross-shaped yoke of Christ is, after all, an instrument of liberation and power to those who live in it with him and learn the meekness and lowliness of heart that brings rest to the soul." Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 263

"After a man is saved, God will continue His training efforts. 'Putting on Christ' and Christ 'being formed in us' and having 'the mind of Christ' certainly do not mean simply reading what Christ said and attempting to put it into practice. Rather they mean that a real Person, not something remote and abstruse, comes to you day after day and 'interfering with you very self' shapes you into a being with a life similar to God's own. The command to the Christian to be perfect is no hyperbole but precisely what Christ meant. He begins on earth a process that will be consummated in heaven, but it is a process and will not allow you successfully to play the hypocrite with your naked self. God will not allow you to take the attitude, 'I never expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a decent ordinary Chap.' His plan is indeed to make you into a heavenly being. This may account for the rough time Christians go through, for He is turning every one of his children into 'a little Christ.' He is not like a trainer who teaches a horse to jump better; He is in the business of turning horses into winged creatures." Clyde Kilby, The Christian Word of C. S. Lewis, pp. 181-182.

"Wounded healers must forsake the prideful tendency to be defined only in terms of strengths and wholeness. They must will authenticity, especially where they're still weak and tempted. That liberates the witness of God's incredible sufficiency and makes real that sufficiency through others who mediate Christ's grace and truth." Andrew Comiskey, Pursuing Sexual Wholeness, p, 191

"The historical roots of the theory of evolution are quite complex. But apart from a newly awakened fascination with the "laws of history" (Herder, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche) there was, no doubt, another ingredient: the Industrial Revolution with its concept of advance by improved workability. The idea that in the vast factory of nature things which do not work well are discarded for things which work better arises out of the mood of the nineteenth century. The entire universe was made to fit the drab climate of Manchester. While the pic of Genesis, with its powerful poetic form, was rejected as "anthropomorphic," an evolutionist concept of how things came about is tinged with the ephemeral of the laboratory and the market place." Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman. p. 291

"When people are so self-convinced that the world needs their accomplishments more than their sanctity and prayer-depth, they never do face squarely the overwhelming figure of Christ and his message in life and word." Thomas Dubay, S. M., The Evidential Power of Beauty, p. 301

"Ministries which attack only the surface of sin and fail to ground spiritual growth in the believer's union with Christ produce either self-righteousness or despair, and both of these conditions are inimical to spiritual life." Richard F. Lovelace in "Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal"

"Every Christian experience is an experience of faith; that is, it is an experience of what we have not...We are not saved by the love we exercise, but by the love we trust." P. T. Forsyth in "Christian Perfection"

"The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of." Blaise Pascal

"To believe in [Jesus Christ] and not to believe in what He believed, not to love what He loved and not to desire what He desired, is not to believe in Him." Alexander Schmemann in "Of Water & the Spirit"

"Because victory is his, therefore it is ours. If only we will not try to gain the victory but simply to maintain it, then we shall see the enemy utterly routed. We must not ask the Lord to enable US to overcome the enemy, nor even look to HIM to overcome, but praise him because he has already done so; he IS victor. It is all a matter of faith in him. If we believe the Lord, we shall not pray so much but rather we shall praise him more. The simpler and clearer our faith in him, the less we shall pray in such situations and the more we shall praise." Watchman Nee in "Sit, Walk, Stand."